


Polyglot in Collective

by BlackEyedGirl



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: Episode: s01e02 0-8-4, Fake Science, Ficlet, Gen, Getting to Know Each Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-10-05
Updated: 2013-10-05
Packaged: 2017-12-28 11:14:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,928
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/991372
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BlackEyedGirl/pseuds/BlackEyedGirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The thing she realises? It's not that Fitz and Simmons don’t speak English, it's that Ward doesn't speak person. [Spoilers for eps 1 and 2]</p>
            </blockquote>





	Polyglot in Collective

Skye is observant, okay? She observes. She works shit out and puts pieces together. She’s also terrified, still, in ways there aren’t words for, and conflicted in ways she only allows herself when her phone is blinking a green command-line asking her to make a decision. There is a lot going on, and Skye is trying to take it all in, deal with the fact that she’s apparently not only _working_ for the scary men in dark suits but has _moved into their plane_. For the first few missions, she has more to worry about than exactly what’s wrong with the people she’s sharing the plane with. Like whether or not she should be here. She makes nice all the same, because running away from this is a decision she wants to make for herself. Later, though, when they’ve managed not to get each other killed, Skye does take a breath. She looks at them properly.

She’s normally better with people, sort of, and she’s trying to pull Ward out of the box she instinctively threw him into marked ‘asshole white dude with a hard-on for guns and the Patriot Act’ (it’s a specifically labelled box, but she likes to be clear, and anyway there is no shortage of occupants). She stands back a little, watches the three of them working together, for certain values of both work and together. The thing she realises? It's not that Fitz and Simmons don’t speak English, it's that Ward doesn't speak _person_. 

She thought it was a government thing – he says ‘on the stick’ and ‘SO’ and Skye thought maybe that was just how the people here worked. But Fitz and Simmons are, when they’re not talking over the top of each other about words that turn out to mean _explosion_ , pretty all right. May is maybe the coolest person Skye has ever met and she might have a bit of a crush on the woman. And Coulson... Coulson answers questions. Skye is not pushing it, she doesn’t know how far this goes or even how much of what he’s telling her is true. But she gets the impression from Ward’s hatefaces that at least some of it is, and the stuff that is, she’s not meant to know. She also gets the impression that even by the standards of their apparently pretty weird team, Coulson is not by-the-book. 

But Ward is still the weirdest one. Ward is unbelievably arrogant, and stubborn to the point where Skye seriously considered that he might be a badly-programmed cyborg. She doesn’t want to rule these things out any more. He seems genuinely perplexed by the idea of problem-solving that doesn’t involve a straight line with violence at the end of it. Worst of all, he just doesn’t get jokes. She learns this the hard way, when he responds to a completely obvious “Oh my _God_ , look behind you,” by _throwing her to the ground_ and pointing a gun at _empty air_. (She had great plans for that set-up, an awesome puncture to his hilarious sense of righteousness.) He had not been impressed when he figured out there was nothing there. Neither had she, given the way she was being flattened under a six-four fully muscled man, who showed no particular inclination to let her up to breathe. 

It’s no wonder he doesn’t speak scientist, she thinks, when he can barely work out what Coulson means when he throws out his best deadpan. She almost feels sorry for the guy. (She definitely feels sorry for Coulson.) Skye figures out that Ward usually notices when people are insulting him, he (mostly) picks up on snark, but unless she’s making a ‘this is me screwing with you’ face, irony is not one of the six languages he speaks. 

And that’s sort of okay. Ward is bad at people. He doesn’t actually have more of a problem with her than he does with anyone else who doesn’t meet his standards of combat-readiness. Which is almost everyone, but fine. It’s not personal, the way he doesn’t get her at all. He doesn’t get anyone, without serious cues. Of the many and varied ways Skye is realising he is going to be pissing her off on a day-to-day basis, the fact that she’s going to have to seriously consider her facial expressions is not the worst of them. She calls him out when he’s being a jackass (often, particularly to Fitz for whatever reason) but when he’s just blinking at her with that ‘what the hell just happened?’ expression, really all she can do is laugh.

Besides, he has his plus points. He is super-committed to none of them dying. That’s not anything that used to be on her list of valuable qualities in possible friends, but in the here and now it’s okay. She doesn’t much want to be shot. 

They’re in the gym – again – and he has tripped her up – again. He is an absolute pain in her ass and he leans down to offer her his hand. 

She takes it, sighing. “My hero.”

Ward’s mouth opens a little and he stares at her.

Skye bats her eyes obnoxiously wide as she stands up. He takes a beat and then rolls his. She says, “No, seriously, if I ever get into trouble-”

He waits her out, mostly patient. He’s getting better about that.

She finishes, “Send May to get me out, okay?”

When she laughs, Ward joins in. He says, “Same.”

“But if she’s busy,” Skye says, “I guess you’ll do.”

“Thanks,” he drawls.

The wallscreen flicks on and Coulson’s voice demands, “Lab, now.”

“Problem?” Skye asks.

“Maybe. A little potentially extraterrestrial activity we’re not sure we like the look of. I’ll fill you both in when you get here.” The screen turns off.

“How does he _do_ that?” Skye asks.

Ward follows her down the hallway. “What?”

“Be so- I don’t know. 'Here be aliens, but stay cool kids, I’ve got this'.”

Ward hmms, and she turns her head to see him shrug. He says, “He’s got experience.”

“In aliens?” she asks. “I know he got stabbed by one and all but-”

“He pretty much field-managed the Avengers Initiative,” Ward says, like that’s totally normal information to just throw into conversation. Like she should have known that which, hello? Coulson answers questions but only the ones she would ever have thought to _ask_.

“He what?” she asks. “Like Captain America, Thor, those Avengers.”

She can see Ward mentally discard another aspersion on her former activities, which is maybe a sign that he’s growing. He says, “You knew that SHIELD-?”

“Yeah, but Coulson’s all like- normal. Ish. I mean, he’s a badass secret agent and he knows way more about me than I’d like-” Ward scoffs, which is weird, but she’s on a roll. “-but if he’s used to running with superheroes how in the hell did he end up with this team?”

That’s about the point they arrive at the lab, and Coulson meets her eyes. “I asked nicely.”

“Sorry, I just-”

“I like putting teams together.” Coulson says. “People fascinate me. The way they’re different, around different people. Every interaction we have changes us.”

That’s almost terrifyingly honest, and she really does want to know more, but there’s a hologram of something brought up over FitzSimmons desk. It looks like a piece of coral with an antenna.

Coulson points at it. “This is new.”

“Isn’t- aren’t all of the things we’ve been dealing with new?” she asks.

Simmons says, “It’s- some kind of a neural link, not like the _other_ neural link, the Chitauri tech, but more like it sends messages which feed right into the superior temporal gyrus, without any necessary interaction with auditory or visual receptors.”

Skye goes for it: “It talks to your brain.”

Simmons nods. “Exactly.” She smiles brightly, spinning the hologram and leaning in to get a better look. She looks so pleased with it.

“What does it _say_?” Ward asks, which is an unexpectedly excellent question, Skye will give him that one.

“We’re not sure,” Fitz answers. “None of the people it spoke to so far exactly remained, well, conscious. The signals it’s sending out are like nothing we’ve seen before. Look at the frequencies.” He waves his hand at a graph which, Skye assumes, shows what he’s talking about.

“Excellent,” Skye says. “Great. So naturally we’re heading down there.”

May’s voice drifts over the intercom. “Landing in ten, better be ready. If you’re planning on creating some kind of magical earmuffs, now would be the time.”

“ _Science_ ,” Fitz corrects, only mostly under his breath.

Ward asks, with the tone of a man just casually floating this as an option, “We can’t just blow it up?”

“We could,” Coulson says. “Of course, if it’s alive, and sentient, and doesn’t understand why we’re not just talking back to it, that might seem a little mean.”

“Plus,” Simmons says, “we don’t know if this is its full range, and I would imagine that it screaming when we try to kill it could be enough to severely overload the cerebral cortex of anyone in the vicinity. Which could be blocks, miles, and if it’s provoked non-lethal and temporary unconsciousness so far, for all we know right now this is a dormant state, any escalation from that could lead to massive trauma in anyone within the radius.”

“Comas,” Skye says, “bleeding, lots of hurt people, in a pretty big area. And that would be bad.”

She does look at Ward when she says this, and he glares back at her. “I know that.”

“Just checking.” She nods, spreading her hands wide in front of her. He examines her face. She can’t imagine him as James Bond, doesn’t know what he would look like if he was acting, using the spy techniques she’s sure someone taught him back in ‘the Academy’ or whatever. She only knows what he looks like when he’s with her, which has so far mostly been either ‘dead inside’, ‘shooting things’ or ‘what the hell?’. 

Eventually, he nods back at her. “Okay.” This time, half-assed as it is, he smiles first. Then: “So, robots?”

“You think it _is_ a robot?” Fitz asks, “or you want to _use_ -?”

“Your robots,” Ward says, firm. “Go get.” 

“English,” Fitz snarks absently.

Skye grins, and turns to see Coulson looking at her as though he has all of her numbers and is just waiting for the right time to use them. The thing about being observant, getting that front row seat to the weird wide world– sometimes people look back at you. In a battle between the two of them for who can decode faster, she’s betting on herself, but God only knows what he’ll figure out in the meantime. She guesses they’ll have to wait to the end to find out what either of them plans to do with that knowledge. That’s one terrifying thought but in the meantime, Simmons is trying to show her how to pack the baby robots away right, and Ward is ineffectually fending off Fitz’s little shove like he couldn’t incapacitate three of the four of them in thirty-seconds flat. There are more important things but Skye has spent so long without these parts. If she’s going to learn to be a consultant, to learn how their mission works, then she wants to pick this up too; she is going to be fluent. She tucks the bots away, and only realises she’s smiling again when she raises her head and sees Ward flicker a smile at her in return.


End file.
